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The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c12.s3: 12

The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c12.s3

Language
English

12

c12.s3.1

At first sight, the paradigm of cyclical alternation between the complementary phases of grāma and araṇya may appear as an elegant solution to the conundrum of the king's authority. On further consideration, however, it is clearly far from satisfactory, for it makes authority the sport of fortune in the unending circulatory game. Instead of wielding the daṇḍa over the community, the king has on his return to pass it on to another who then has to set out, if the king does not start again on another wandering phase himself. In fact, it makes effective kingship illusory. But that is not all, for we cannot overlook the risk and mortal danger involved in the aggressive conventions of the warrior phase.

c12.s3.2

The jeopardy to which kingship is subject is curiously but no less clearly expressed by the recurring notion of the disintegrating effect that the unction is supposed to have on the anointed. The rājasūya is also known as *varuṇasava*, or consecration of Varuṇa.⁸⁸ The rājasūya sacrificer enacts the role of this sovereign god. But in the same context, it is said that the unction takes away the god's as well as his human epigone's strength, causing them, like humpty-dumpty, to fall apart. The king's unction is at the same time his undoing, and he must be put together again by the *saṁsṛp* offerings. In other words, he must, as we saw, go out into the wilds to recuperate the strength that has left him.⁸⁹

c12.s3.3

Quite apart from the mythological motif of Varuṇa's disintegration, the ambivalence and danger of the royal ritual and specifically of the rājasūya is in a different but no less telling way documented in the epics. Now the epics—both the *Mahābhārata* and the *Rāmāyaṇa*—show exactly the same paradigm of cyclical alternation between grāma and araṇya. Both the Pāṇḍavas and Rāma are forced to leave throne and realm and go out on a life of adventure in the wilds and return only after they have successfully come out of a long series of dangerous battles and ordeals. In both cases, the departure is connected with the abhiṣeka. Rāma is cheated out of his already arranged unction. In the *Mahābhārata*, Yudhiṣṭhira, the leader of the Pāṇ- ḍava brothers, has the rājasūya performed but is then also cheated out of his realm in a game of dice forced upon him by his opponent, Duryodhana. Though the dicing game follows Yudhiṣṭhira’s rājasūya, it does so without interval, and comparison with the ritual texts makes clear that it actually belongs to the rājasūya. It is not surprising, then, that the rājasūya is considered in the epics to be particularly dangerous. When the deceased father of the Pāṇḍavas has his wish that Yudhiṣṭhira perform the rājasūya transmitted by the sage Nārada, the latter takes the opportunity to point out the dangers of this royal ritual, which will lead to the destruction of the kṣatriyas in the great Mahābhārata war—an idea that is later repeated by the sage Vyāsa, as well as on other occasions.⁹⁰ So the rājasūya is directly linked to the tragic war, or rather, we might say that the war is part and parcel of the rājasūya cycle. We saw already that the *Aitareya Brāhmaṇa* has the abhiṣeka followed by war and conquest, after which another consecratory sacrifice, the horse sacrifice, is performed. Similarly, the Pāṇḍavas as well as Rāma perform on their triumphant return the aśvamedha, which in the case of the *Mahābhārata* is given as an expiation for the catastrophal bloodshed.⁹¹

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